Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

What an oily man, so well-lubricated I did not hear his approach. “Stafford Grimes, at your service.”

He offered to buy me a drink but I drew the line at that unseemliness.

That did not stop him ordering one for himself and sipping it – and several successors – noisily during the course of my questions. Years of Venusian light had turned his skin to wrinkled brown leather: drinker’s eyes looked out from heavily hooded lids: years of squinting into the ultra-violet. His neck and hands were mottled white with pockmarks where melanomas had been frozen out. Sunburn, melancholy and alcoholism: the classic recipe for Honorary Consuls system-wide, not just on Venus.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me. So: you met him.”

“I will never forget him. Pearls of Aphrodite. Size of your head, Lady Ida.

There’s a fortune waiting for the man...”

“Or woman.” I chided, and surreptitiously activated the recording ring beneath my glove.

PLATE 2: V flor scopulum : The Ocean Mist Flower. The name is a misnomer: the Ocean Mist Flower is not a flower, but a coral animalcule of the aerial reefs of the Tellus Ocean. The seeming petals are absorption surfaces drawing moisture from the frequent ocean fogs of those latitudes. Pistils and stamen bear sticky palps, which function in the same fashion as Terrene spider webs, trapping prey. Venus boasts an entire ecosystem of marine insects unknown on Earth.

This cut is the most three dimensional of Lady Ida’s Botanica Veneris. Reproductions only hint at the sculptural quality of the original. The ‘petals’ have been curled at the edges over the blunt side of a pair of scissors. Each of the two hundred and eight palps has been sprung so that they stand proud from the black paper background.

Onion-paper, hard-painted card.

APHRODITE’S PEARL. TRULY, the pearl beyond price. The pearls of Starosts and Aztars. But the cloud reefs are perilous. Snap a man’s body clean in half, those bivalves. Crush his head like a Vulpeculan melon. Snare a hand or an ankle and drown him. Aphrodite’s Pearls are blood pearls. A fortune awaits anyone, my dear, who can culture them. A charming man, Arthur Hyde – that brogue of his made anything sound like the blessing of heaven itself. Charm the avios from the trees – but natural, unaffected. It was no surprise to learn he was of aristocratic stock. Quality: you can’t hide it. In those days I owned a company – fishing trips across the Archipelago. The legend of the Ourogoonta, the Island that is a Fish, was a potent draw. Imagine hooking one of those. Of course they never did. No, I’d take them out, show them the cloud reefs, the Krid hives, the wing-fish migration, the air-jellies; get them pissed on the boat, take their photographs next to some thawed out javelinfish they hadn’t caught. Simple, easy, honest money. Why wasn’t it enough for me? I had done the trick enough times myself, drink one for the punter’s two, yet I fell for it that evening in the Windward Tavern, drinking hot spiced kashash and the night wind whistling up in the spires of the dead Krid nest-haven like the caged souls of drowned sailors. Drinking for days down the Great Twilight, his one for my two. Charming, so charming, until I had pledged my boat on his plan. He would buy a planktoneer – an old bucket of a sea-skimmer with nary a straight plate or a true rivet in her. He would seed her with spores and send her north on the great circulatory current, like a maritime cloud reef. Five years that current takes to circulate the globe before it returns to the arctic waters that birthed it. Five years is also the time it takes the Clam of Aphrodite to mature – what we call pearls are no such thing. Sperm, Lady Ida. Compressed sperm. In waters it dissolves and disperses. Each Great Dawn the Tellus Ocean is white with it. In the air it remains compact – the most prized of all jewels. Enough of fluids. By the time the reef ship reached the deep north, the clams would be mature and the cold water would kill them. It would be a simple task to strip the hulk with high-pressure hoses, harvest the pearls and trouser the fortune.

Five years makes a man fidgety for his investment. Arthur sent us weekly reports from the Sea Wardens and the Krid argosies. Month on month, year on year, I began to suspect that the truth had wandered far from those chart co-ordinates. I was not alone. I formed a consortium with my fellow investors and chartered a ’rigible.

And there at Map 60 North, 175 East, we found the ship – or what was left of it, so overgrown was it with Clams of Aphrodite. Our investment had been lined and lashed by four Krid cantoons: as we arrived they were in the process of stripping it with halberds and grappling-hooks. Already the decks and superstructure were green with clam meat and purple with Krid blood. Arthur stood in the stern frantically waving a Cross of St Patrick flag, gesturing for us to get out, get away.

Krid pirates were plundering our investment. Worse, Arthur was their prisoner. We were an unarmed aerial gad-about, so we turned tail and headed for the nearest Sea Warden castle to call for aid.

Charmer. Bloody buggering charmer. I know he’s your flesh and blood, but... I should have thought! If he’d been captured by Krid pirates, they wouldn’t have let him wave a bloody flag to warn us.

When we arrived with a constabulary cruiser, all we found was the capsized hulk of the planktoneer and flocks of avios gorging on clam offal. Duped! Pirates my arse – excuse me. Those four cantoons were laden to the gunwales with contract workers. He never had any intention of splitting the profits with us.

The last we heard of him, he had converted the lot into Bank of Ishtar Bearer Bonds – better than gold – at Yez Tok and headed in country. That was twelve years ago.

Your brother cost me my business, Lady Granville-Hyde. It was a good business; I could have sold it, made a little pile. Bought a place on Ledekh Syant – maybe even make it back to Earth to see out my days to a decent calendar. Instead... Ach, what’s the use. Please believe me when I say that I bear your family no ill will – only your brother. If you do succeed in finding him – and if I haven’t, I very much doubt you will – remind him of that, and that he still owes me.

PLATE 3: V lilium aphrodite : the Archipelago sea-lily. Walk-the-Water in Thekh: there is no comprehensible translation from Krid. A ubiquitous and fecund diurnal plant, it grows so aggressively in the Venerian Great Day that by Great Evening bays and harbours are clogged with blossoms and passage must be cleared by special bloom-breaker ships.

Painted paper, watermarked Venerian tissue, inks and scissor-scrolled card.

SO DEAR, SO admirable a companion, the Princess Latufai. She knew I had been stinting with the truth in my excuse of shopping for paper, when I went to see the Honorary Consul down in Ledekh Port. Especially when I returned without any paper. I busied myself in the days before our sailing to Ishtaria on two cuts – the Sea Lily and the Ocean Mist Flower – even if it is not a flower, according to my Carfax’s B estiary of the Inner Worlds. S he was not fooled by my industry and I felt soiled and venal. All Tongan woman have dignity, but the Princess possesses such innate nobility that the thought of lying to her offends nature itself. The moral order of the universe is upset. How can I tell her that my entire visit to this world is a tissue of fabrications?

WEATHER AGAIN FAIR, with the invariable light winds and interminable grey sky. I am of Ireland, supposedly we thrive on permanent overcast, but even I find myself pining for a glimpse of sun. Poor Latufui: she grows wan for want of light. Her skin is waxy, her hair lustreless. We have a long time to wait for a glimpse of sun: Carfax states that the sky clears partially at the dawn and sunset of Venus’s Great Day. I hope to be off this world by then.